


The Left Turn at Albuquerque Caper

by Gray Cardinal (Gray_Cardinal)



Category: Castle, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
Genre: AU, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-24
Packaged: 2018-02-26 20:33:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2665433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Cardinal/pseuds/Gray%20Cardinal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two weeks had passed since Richard Castle’s dramatic wedding-day disappearance, and Captain Victoria Gates – in unofficial but carefully arranged rotation with Esposito and Lanie Parish – had taken to “dropping into” the Old Haunt at regular intervals, to make certain Kate Beckett wasn’t sliding entirely off the rails into depression or worse.</p><p>And then a pink vortex dropped a denim-jacketed teenager into the bar....</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Left Turn at Albuquerque Caper

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer:** Captain Gates and the Castle universe were created by Andrew Marlowe and exist under ABC’s corporate umbrella. Zack and the Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? universe come from DIC animation (and The Learning Company) and have been migrating to assorted new corporate umbrellas in recent years. None of their corporate owners, however, have had anything to do with the present bit of nonsense….
> 
>  **A Note on Chronology:** This story takes place about two weeks after the events of the Castle 6th-season finale, “For Better or Worse”, and constitutes the beginning of an AU which pre-empts the canonical Season 7 episodes aired to date (or at the least detours sharply around “Driven” and “Montreal”).

As a rule, Victoria Gates avoided the Old Haunt. It wasn’t that she disliked Richard Castle – however much he occasionally tested her patience, and however loudly she might deny it in public, she’d long since developed a genuine respect for Castle’s instincts. Rather, it was her Internal Affairs training. Given Castle’s unique status at the 12th and his relationship with Detective Beckett, Gates felt it best to intrude on Castle’s life outside the precinct as little as possible.

Present circumstances, however, dictated otherwise. Two weeks had passed since Castle’s dramatic wedding-day disappearance, and what few off-hours Kate Beckett was allowing herself were being spent mostly at the Haunt. So Gates – in unofficial but carefully arranged rotation with Esposito and Lanie Parish – had taken to “dropping into” the bar at regular intervals, to make certain Kate wasn’t sliding entirely off the rails into depression or worse.

So far, the situation appeared to be stable. Gates watched from her booth near the bar as Kate trudged out the front entrance, heading “home” to the apartment she still hadn’t vacated, even after the engagement had been announced. Martha and Alexis had both tried and failed to talk her out of leaving the loft, and had since adopted their own rotation for delivering take-out meals to Kate’s door. Gates, meanwhile, had had a quiet word with Ellis in IT, who was keeping an eye on the GPS locator in Kate’s squad car “just in case”.

All of which meant that Gates could go home as well, at least once she finished her smoked-salmon-and-hummus appetizer plate. Castle might be a difficult man, she reflected, but he’d done a commendable job of reviving the Old Haunt from its near-demise to its current state of quiet prosperity. So the captain was just sliding out of her seat when a disk of glittering pink light erupted next to her, spat a blond denim-jacketed teenager onto the floor, then shrank in on itself and vanished.

“What in Hell--?”

“Ow! Where in the heck—?” The teenager scrambled upright, consulted a gadget that looked like a cross between a tablet computer and a Swiss Army knife, frowned, and gave Gates a frustrated glance. “This _is_ New York City, right?” He tapped at the device’s controls. “Chief? Chief, are you reading me here?”

Gates was still blinking from the neon-pink flare. “Metropolitan downtown Manhattan,” she confirmed dryly. “And technically, you ought not be in here without an adult.”

The young man’s eyes flicked toward the bar. “Acme Detective Agency,” he said, pulling an ID case from his jacket pocket. “On assignment. We’ve got clearances on file for this kind of situation.”

Gates’ eyebrows rose, and she pulled her own ID. “Captain Victoria Gates, New York Police Department. You don’t seriously expect me to believe that’s a real badge, now do you?”

The teen bristled. “It seriously is, and I seriously do. If I can just get the Chief online—” He paused, studying his device’s screen. “Oh, do **not** tell me that! That isn’t even supposed to be possible!”

A bark of laughter escaped Gates’ lips. “Young man, you just fell out of a hole in the air,” she pointed out. “A moment ago, I’d have said that wasn’t possible either.”

The comment earned her another peeved glare. “The name is Zack,” he said curtly. “The C-5 corridor is totally established technology – high-end, sure, but established. But it only connects points within the same space-time baseline, say San Francisco to New York. There is no way, I repeat no way, that it could bounce me from San Francisco in one dimension to New York in the next dimension over.”

He gave his tablet device a light whack with his free hand as if to emphasize his point – and a rectangle of pink light materialized in the air next to it. “I wouldn’t bet on that one, Zackmeister,” said a scratchy synthesized voice. “According to the Acme mainframe, you’re actually _five_ dimensions sideways from where you started.”

It was the Zackmeister’s turn to blink. “If you say so, Chief. But if I’m here, does that mean that Carmen...?”

“That’s what the techs in Z-Section are saying,” the Chief said. “Where you are is where we think Carmen went – more or less. You’re in the right New York, but the C-5’s margin of error is higher than it would be on home ground. Only now it’s more like a C-11 – Z-Section’s already rewriting the specs to account for all the extra variables.”

 _Carmen_. Gates stared at the angular animated face gazing out of the floating screen, felt the dominoes fall over in her head, and stared ruefully at the mostly empty glass of cider next to her appetizer plate. “Oh dear Lord,” she said. “Please tell me this is all a hallucination and let me wake up.”

“No can do, Captain Gates,” Zack told her, his tone considerably more sympathetic. “At least not unless I’m a figment of someone’s imagination, and I think I’d know something like that.”

Gates gave him a wry look. “You might be surprised. Suppose I told you that in this dimension, you and your Chief are characters in an animated cartoon series?”

“Hey!” said the Chief, “I resemble that remark! Tell me, am I the dashing hero or the plucky sidekick?”

Zack laughed. “I’m guessing the comic relief. At least I clean up well in live action.”

Gates favored them both with her best withering glare. “Gentlemen, please! To business. I presume you two are here in pursuit of—” she paused, her brain still wrapping itself around the idea “—Carmen Sandiego. The relevant question thus becomes, what is _she_ doing here?” The captain shook her head ruefully. “The very idea gives me a headache. You should really be talking to Mr. Castle – I’m certain he’d find this case utterly delightful.”

“Castle? As in Richard Castle? The TV series character?”

Gates blinked. “Good God, I hope not. He’s hard enough to live with as it is.”

Zack blinked back. “Let me get this straight. Richard Castle is _real_ in this dimension? As in, the Richard Castle who writes murder mysteries based on this totally hot police detective he’s fallen for, but good?”

“Close,” Gates said dryly. “Here he’s the Richard Castle who is constantly disrupting the efficiency of my precinct and distracting my best detective – which would be utterly intolerable save for his periodic moments of deductive brilliance (but you did **not** hear me say that). Also,” she added, “he bought this bar a couple of years ago.”

Zack’s face lit up. “Wait, so he’s _here_?”

Gates’ expression sobered. “I’m afraid not. Just now, in fact, he’s…missing.”

“That can’t be coincidence,” Zack said at once. “Could Carmen maybe have stolen him?”

“It’s not her usual style,” the Chief pointed out. “She’s a thief, not a kidnapper.”

“There’s another difficulty,” Gates put in. “Assuming your Ms. Sandiego’s method follows the cartoon I know, she would have taken full credit for the abduction and left a signature clue behind. And nothing of the kind has happened.”

The Chief’s glasses slid forward down his holographic nose. “An excellent point. Then again, Carmen usually aims her clues right at us, as opposed to local law enforcement. And with the dimension-jumping factor in play—”

“That may be it!” Zack snapped his fingers. “Maybe the dimension-jumping thing _is_ the clue – or at least the angle we need. Chief, you said Z-Section traced Carmen here, right?”

“Right.”

“And they’re calling ‘here’ four degrees sideways from our home universe.”

“More or less,” said the Chief. “Like I said, they’re still working out all the variables.”

Captain Gates held up a hand. “I think I see where you’re going. So Mr. Castle’s abduction is part of a larger series of crimes – correct?”

Zack nodded. “Exactly.”

A _dingdingding_ sound effect warbled out of the Chief’s background screen. “Z-Section is right there with you,” the Chief told them. “The good news is, we know Carmen stopped off in two other alternate dimensions before she landed in this one – and we _think_ she collected one native from each.”

With a sigh, Gates downed the last swallow of hard cider. “So to borrow an outrageous theory from Mr. Castle, you believe she’s hijacking the ‘real’ versions of people you see as fictional characters.”

“Got it in one,” Zack said. “Only without more data than we’ve got, there’s no way to tell who her other targets were.”

“There are just too many possibilities,” the Chief said. “If the theory is sound, it follows that there’s a baseline story-universe for every television series ever aired...and by extension, every feature film, every novel, every comic book.” His animated head began to throb visibly. “I’m not sure I can cope with that much alternate reality!”

Gates’ own head was starting to spin, but she did her best to banish her own impending headache and summon up her professional voice. “Let’s keep to specifics, then. If your universe has a TV series about Richard Castle, what actor plays him?”

“His name’s Nathan Fillion,” Zack said at once.

“That sounds familiar,” said Gates, opening her purse and extracting her smartphone. “Let’s just see....aha, thank you, Wikipedia. Quite a few credits – _Firefly, Buffy, Drive, Dr. Horrible._ Recently featured on _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D._ , though they evidently killed off his character last spring. I can definitely see the resemblance.”

At the sight of the phone, both Zack’s and the Chief’s eyes widened, and the Chief spoke up. “Zack, can you interface the D-Skimmer with that device?”

“On it.”

Zack tapped a control, causing a small antenna to extend from one corner of the unit. There was a soft _thrumm_ and a faint glow at the antenna’s tip, and Gates stared in astonishment as her phone’s Web browser began flickering like a strobe light. “Good God,” she said. “If I end up with overage charges on my data plan, you people are getting the bill.”

“You’ll be fine,” Zack said, grinning. “The D-Skimmer routed the download through the bar’s server. If anyone gets that bill, it’ll be Castle – once we get him back.”

“ _If_ you get him back,” Gates shot back.

“Oh, we will now,” said the Chief. “The feed from your universe’s Internet gave us enough data to triangulate Carmen’s path. Get ready, Zackmeister – you’re taking the C-11 to Manhattan-G!”

Zack blinked as the glowing disk-shaped portal irised into existence. “G?”

“For _Gargoyles_!” The Chief’s voice took on a wild echo as his screen and Zack were both vacuumed into the C-11 corridor with a fortunately hushed _whooooshhh!_ Gates herself felt the tug of the energy vortex, but she kept one hand clamped firmly on the edge of the booth’s bolted-down table, and the other on what was left of her smoked salmon, and in a few seconds the portal spun down into nothingness and disappeared.

Gates sat silent for two full minutes, nibbling absently on salmon and hummus and trying to convince herself that the entire incident had been a particularly vivid daydream. _Think about it,_ she told herself. _The chronology makes no sense whatsoever. The Carmen Sandiego series aired twenty-odd years ago; the real Zack – if there were a real Zack – would be Castle’s own age by now._

Her phone _quirp_ ed, signaling the arrival of an email. She picked it up, glanced at the text, and let out a startled breath.

> From: The C.H.I.E.F. ( _chief@acme.crimenet.com@X0Y0Z0_ )  
>  To: Victoria Gates ( _v.gates@nypd.gov@X0Y4Z1)  
> _ RE: Time Factors
> 
> _No, you’re not crazy. We just didn’t think to cover the temporal issues while we were there. Two things: remember, in our universe Zack – and Ivy, and all the other ACME detectives – are in fact computer-generated avatars. As such, they don’t age. (Before you ask, Carmen herself predates the avatar system.) And second, the dimension-shift technology is an offshoot of Carmen’s and ACME’s time-travel research, which means that Carmen can leap into a “television universe” at any point in its series timeline she chooses. So there was clearly a reason she took your Richard Castle when she did._
> 
> _OTOH, there are limits to the liberties we can take with time, so we may get him back to you in a few hours...or a few days. But we WILL get him back to you. ACME has never failed to recover a Carmen Sandiego artifact – and I promise you we never will._
> 
> _Best,_
> 
> _The C.H.I.E.F._

“Good God,” Gates murmured. “I definitely need a drink.”

She stood, strode up to the bar, and was about to order a stiff vodka martini when the Old Haunt’s front door burst open and a familiar ruggedly handsome figure rushed in. Castle was sufficiently excited that he nearly hugged Captain Gates before realizing that she wasn’t Kate Beckett, but he couldn’t stop himself from burbling.

“You would not _believe_ where I’ve been! There was this lovely girl named Tara, and actual living gargoyles, and I met Arthur Fonzarelli – yes, _that_ Arthur Fonzarelli –”

Gates rolled her eyes. _Thank you, Carmen Sandiego, wherever you are._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Super Genius Caper (The "Left Turn at Albuquerque Caper" Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12089220) by [Syrena_of_the_lake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrena_of_the_lake/pseuds/Syrena_of_the_lake)




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